End zone

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End Zone is the second novel by the American author Don DeLillo , published in 1972. At the center of the plot is a student at a fictional college in Texas who plays college football and listens to lectures on game theory and nuclear war strategy . Even if American Football and the Cold War are thematized in a university setting , End Zone is neither a university novel nor a sports novel, and certainly not a Cold War novel . Instead, the language itself is at the center of the novel, which, like most of DeLillo's works, is part of postmodern literature .

Content and structure

The protagonist of the novel is the student Gary Harkness, running back at the fictional Logos College in a desert town in western Texas . Harkness is an outsider there, he was previously deregistered from several universities. Studying at Logos College is his last chance. The action takes place in the early 1970s, at the time of the novel's publication.

Other key figures besides Harkness are:

  • Taft Robinson, also running back, is the first black student to ever enroll at Logos College. Before that he was enrolled in Columbia . Runs the 100 yards in 9.3 seconds. They got him for his speed.
  • Myna Corbett, fellow student and friend of Gary. Rich and overweight with too much interest in science fiction .
  • Anatole Bloomberg, roommate in Gary's dorm room, left tackle the offense . Not a Texan, an outsider like Harkness.
  • Emmett Creed, head coach of the football team. Sports journalists called him "Big Bend", after his origins in the deepest province, Big Bend National Park . Laconic speeches to the team: “Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody ”. Football motto: "It's only a game, but it's the only game."

Minor characters are:

  • Father of Gary Harkness, a former Michigan State football player and now a vitamin, nutritional supplement, and antibiotic sales agent . The father's main motive in relation to Gary is to try to make up for his own failure with a great son's career. Motto: "Suck in that gut and go harder."
  • Wally Pippich, the college's newly appointed Sports Information Director. Wants to turn Gary and Taft into mascots for a marketing campaign: “Taft Robinson and Gary Harkness. The T and G backfield. Taft and Gary. Touch and Go. Thunder and Gore. "
  • Alan Zapalac, a young college lecturer, is teaching the Exobiology class , which both Gary and Myna attend. "Science is religion, did you know that?"
  • Major Staley, professor in the ROTC program, who attended Harkness’s lectures on game theory and nuclear war

The novel consists of 30 chapters, some of which are quite short. The climax of the plot is the game against West Centrex (Chapter 19), followed by the first eighteen chapters - with brief flashbacks to the life of Gary Harkness.

The first eighteen chapters are told from Gary Harkness' perspective. The novel begins with the surprising news that Taft Robinson is moving from Columbia to Logos College. The new coach, Emmett Creed, was brought to college by the founder's widow. He is responsible for Taft's recruitment, which is part of his strategy to take the Logos football program to a high division. In the current league there is now only one real competitor for logos: the likewise fictional West Centrex Biotechnical Institute. This game is approaching the first part, which is devoted in many, mostly laconic dialogues to the two obsessions of Gary Harkness: American football and the nuclear holocaust . With Myrna Corbett, Harkness enjoys picnics in the desert indulging in her tendency towards nihilism .

The West Centrex game is detailed as the written equivalent of a radio broadcast. A colorful language without the clichés of sports reporting as well as the thematic connection with the themes of war and annihilation make the text an unusual example of fictitious sports journalism .

The eleven chapters that follow the game are written in a noticeably different mode. Gary Harkness falls into depression . The college founder's widow dies in a plane crash. Harkness seeks consolation and purpose in his friendship with Myrna and in lectures with Major Staley. Taft Robinson gives up football and only deals with the Holocaust . Gary falls into nihilistic despair until he is admitted to a hospital. The future remains unclear.

History of origin

DeLillo began his career as a novelist relatively late. The son of Italian immigrants was born in 1936 and grew up in the Bronx , attended the Jesuit Fordham University in New York and left it in 1958 with a Bachelor in Communication Arts . In 1959 he began to work as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in New York because he could not find a job in the publishing industry. In addition to his work, he wrote a few short stories. In 1964 he quit his advertising job and devoted himself entirely to literature. DeLillo was 28 years old. In interviews, DeLillo later emphasized that this step was not necessarily part of a grand plan and that he still had to find his role as a writer:

“I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore. [...] Before I ever published a novel, this is how I felt about it - that I was writing for a small audience that could disappear at any minute, and not only was this not a problem, it was a kind of solution. It justified what I wrote and it narrowed expectations in a healthy way. "

- Don DeLillo : Interviews 1991/97

In order to earn a living, he wrote factual texts as a freelance writer in addition to his literary work. DeLillo published his first novel Americana in 1971 with the respected publisher Houghton Mifflin , with whom he also stayed with End Zone (1972) and his third novel Great Jones Street (1973). With Ratner's Star (1976) DeLillo then switched to Alfred A. Knopf .

Interpretation and classification in the work of DeLillo

The novel's title is a play on words: the end zone is the part of the football pitch , a player in possession attain needs to make a touchdown to achieve the same means to end zone literally end or the last area in which you physically by the Nuclear Holocaust or mentally through use of hallucinogenic drugs or through loneliness and depression . In this sense, End Zone is not a sports novel, but a novel about extreme places and conditions:

“End Zone wasn't about football. It's a fairly elusive novel. It seems to me to be about extreme places and extreme states of mind, more than anything else. "

- Don DeLillo : Interview 1988

Compared to DeLillo's later novels, the short work is considered the author's first breakthrough and was largely positively received when the novel was published. Today's literary criticism does not count End Zone as one of DeLillo's main works - that is, White Noise , Libra and Underworld - but sees essential features of DeLillo's work, i. H. Style, choice of topics and narrative structure fully developed in End Zone for the first time .

Thematically, there are a number of parallels with other, mostly later works by DeLillo:

  • The main characters Gary Harkness from End Zone and Billy Twillig from Ratner's Star are adolescent heroes
  • Both End Zone and White Noise have university life as their setting
  • The motif of withdrawal and isolation can be found in several of DeLillo's works; as an element of alienation , it belongs to postmodern literature
  • Language and how it is dealt with are also present in several of DeLillo's works, the mixing of the action level with the meta level is also a stylistic device of postmodern literature. This is already evident in the name of the fictional college, Logos , Greek for word, meaning, speech
  • The fear of nuclear war (“nuclear anxiety”), which manifests itself in End Zone as Gary's fascination for the nuclear end game , reappears in DeLillo's work in Underworld .
  • Sports as a theme - Football in End Zone , Baseball in Underworld and Hockey in Amazons . However, in the narrower sense, End Zone is not called a sports novel.

Reception and literary criticism

The reception of the novel when it was published was largely positive: the reviewer of the New York Times Book Review praised the novel as "wonderful", especially the language and the wit. In the LA Times End Zone, writer Nelson Algren compared DeLillo's debut, Americana . While the protagonist David Bell stayed there, DeLillo has now succeeded in creating a credible character in Gary Harkness. Thomas R. Edwards, who previously discussed Americana in the NYT weekend supplement The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), named End Zone more successful than DeLillo's first novel in the NYTBR front page review. In college football, he found a “more original and efficient vehicle” to convey his point of view. The Washington Post reviewer unreservedly praised the book for its "biting joke" and described it as "powerful and funny, opaque, irritable and playful".

In Time Magazine , End Zone received more critical feedback when it appeared. The critic and UW professor of English literature Roger Sale compared End Zone in his book review in the New York Review of Books with the two new publications The Confession of a Child of the Century by Thomas Rogers and Eat of Me, I am the Savior by Arnold Kemp . All three novels are written from the perspective of the first-person narrator , which was previously reserved for the intimate exploration of the self. Here, however, a new, loud type of first-person narration emerges, which is more like the “crier at an auction” than the explorer of one's own life.

The Canadian literary critic and UCSB professor Hugh Kenner described the novel in LIFE as a “strange feat”: a “book full of zombies” seems lifelike, as if one wanted to show that a “culture that got into action” is becoming more and more paper.

Publications and Adaptations

DeLillo previously published parts of the novel in a modified form. The first publication directly related to End Zone was his short story Game Plan , which appeared in the New Yorker in November 1971 and contained the novel's dramatic climax - the football game against West Centrex. Major parts of the novel - Chapters 1 through 4, 6, and parts of Chapters 7 and 8 - appeared in Sports Illustrated in April 1972 . After the first paperback edition in 1973, new paperback editions were only published again after the great success of White Noise (1985), among others by Penguin .

  • First edition: End Zone . Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1972, ISBN 0-395-13645-8 .
  • British first edition: End Zone . A. Deutsch, London 1973.
  • First paperback edition: End Zone . Pocket Books, New York 1973.
  • Current paperback edition: End Zone . Penguin, New York 1986, ISBN 0-14-008568-8 .

A translation from American into other languages ​​was not done at the time of publication - DeLillo was still too unknown as an author. It was not until White Noise (1985) that the rights to translations of his works for the common languages ​​were granted at the same time as the original was published. End Zone was published in Italian in 2014, the translation was awarded the Gregor von Rezzori Prize in 2015. In 2015, End Zone was also published in Spanish translation.

In 2007, American film director and screenwriter George Ratliff acquired an option to film the novel after sending DeLillo a rough draft of a script. Together with his colleague David Gilbert, Ratliff had previously written the script for the 2007 film Joshua - The First Born (Joshua) . Ratliff and Gilbert wrote a finished screenplay based on End Zone , Ratliff was to direct. Josh Hartnett was to play the lead role as Gary Harkness, while Kat Dennings was slated for the role of his girlfriend Myna Corbett . Actor Sam Rockwell , who was in Joshua , was supposed to play PR man Wally Pippich. Filming was scheduled to begin in New Mexico in spring 2008 , but the film has not yet been finalized.

literature

  • David Cowart: Don DeLillo: the Physics of Language. 2nd Edition. University of Georgia Press, Athens (GA) 2003, ISBN 0-8203-2581-3 .
  • Thomas DePietro (Ed.): Conversations with Don DeLillo . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2005, ISBN 1-57806-704-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ End Zone. New York 1972, p. 3.
  2. ↑ Analogous transfer of the quote: “Knock someone down. Knock someone down. Kill someone. ” End Zone. New York 1972, p. 10.
  3. ↑ Analogous transfer of the quote: “It's only a game, but it's the only game.” End Zone. New York 1972, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Analogous transfer of the quote: "Pull your stomach in and make more effort." End zone. New York 1972, p. 16.
  5. ↑ Translation of the quote: “Taft Robinson and Gary Harkness. The second row with T&G Taft and Gary. Totally dangerous. Death and violence. ” End Zone. New York 1972, p. 151.
  6. ↑ Analogous transfer of the quote: “Science is religion, did you know that?” End Zone. New York 1972, p. 92.
  7. ↑ Analogous transfer of the quotations: “I just quit to quit. I didn't quit to become a writer. I just didn't want to work anymore. […] Before I published a novel, I had the feeling that I was writing for a small audience that could disappear at any moment. That feeling wasn't just not a problem, it was some sort of solution: it justified what I wrote and lowered expectations to a healthy level. ”
    Vince Passaro Interview 1991, p. 78 and Gerald Howard Interview 1997, p. 130. In: Anthony DeCurtis - Interview with Don DeLillo. In: Thomas DePietro (Ed.): Conversations with Don DeLillo . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2005.
  8. ↑ Analogous transfer of the quote: “End Zone is not about football. It is an elusive novel. It seems to me that it's more about extreme places and extreme states of consciousness than anything else. ”
    Anthony DeCurtis - Interview with Don DeLillo. In: Frank Lentricchia (Ed.): "Introducing Don DeLillo". Duke University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8223-1144-5 , p. 57. An abridged version of the interview was published in Rolling Stone in November 1988 .
  9. ^ David Cowart: Don DeLillo: the Physics of Language . Athens 2003, p. 199.
  10. ^ David Cowart: Don DeLillo: the Physics of Language . Athens 2003, p. 18.
  11. ↑ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: A Touchdown for Don DeLillo . In: New York Times. March 22, 1972.
  12. ↑ Nelson Algren: A Waugh in Shoulder Padding. In: Los Angeles Times. March 26, 1972.
  13. ^ Thomas R. Edwards: End Zone by Don DeLillo. In: New York Times Book Review. April 9, 1972, p. 1.
  14. ↑ Steve K. Oberbeck: A kick in the head. In: The Washington Post. April 16, 1972.
  15. ^ Books: Spring Cleaning . In: Time Magazine. April 17, 1972.
  16. ^ Roger Sale: I Am a Novel . In: New York Review of Books. Vol. 18, No. 12 of June 29, 1972.
  17. ↑ Hugh Kenner: End Zone by Don Delillo . In: LIFE Magazine. LIFE Book Reviews, July 14, 1972, p. 20.
  18. ↑ Don DeLillo: Game Plan. In: New Yorker. November 27, 1971, pp. 44-47.
  19. ↑ Don DeLillo: "Pop, Pop, Hit Those People" . In: Sports Illustrated. April 17, 1972, pp. 86-102.
  20. ↑ End Zone . Penguin, New York 1986, ISBN 0-14-008568-8 . (Unchanged new edition 2002.)
  21. ↑ Don DeLillo: End Zone. Translated into Italian by Federica Aceto. Einaudi, Torino 2014, ISBN 978-88-06-19847-3 .
  22. ↑ Don DeLillo: Fin de campo. translated into Spanish. Seix Barral, Barcelona 2015, ISBN 978-84-322-2520-8 .
  23. ↑ Peter Bowen and George Ratliff: The Little Devil . In: Filmmaker Magazine. Summer 2007.
  24. ↑ Michael Fleming: Hartnett runs to "End Zone" . In: Variety. November 8, 2007.